


Son of a Bitch

by Ladyboo



Series: Darlin' and the Doctor [7]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Canon Temporary Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mostly mentioned but still, Pre-Slash, Soulmates, Tarsus IV, soul marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-23
Updated: 2016-03-23
Packaged: 2018-05-28 11:58:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6327931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladyboo/pseuds/Ladyboo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Len never trusted words, not even the ones pressed into his own skin. Words had the power to make or break, could take away everything that he thought mattered in life. What more could a man do, when the most important words his soul mate would ever say to him was a throw-away phrase he heard everywhere he went, other than hope and pray? Funny, Len had never had much luck where prayer was concerned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Son of a Bitch

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, I need to be doing chapters for All the Kings Horses, but I got the idea for this? So I needed to do it. And I doubt my beta minds all that much. Enjoy lovelies!  
> Do you have any idea how hard it is to hunt down the actual script from Into Darkness, labeled based on who has what line? It took me two hours, but there are lines that are word-for-word because of that.

_It wasn’t supposed to be like this_.

-

Aviophobia kept his feet on the ground, grass between his toes and dirt caught in the creases that ran deep within his skin. It kept his heart beating steady, steady, steady in his chest; kept his head from the clouds and his eyes on the ground, busy with the things around him. It watched the words form on the crest of his hip, a quick, sharp script that he would come to recognize even if he could never quite place it, _son of a bitch,_ thick and black where the soul-ink lay against his skin.

Just as it kept him confined to his surroundings and his circumstances, it watched him, ever omnipresent and potent, heavy where it settled within his lungs. It watched him through the death of his Daddy, and it watched him through the rise and fall of his marriage; it witnessed the moan of his name on Jocelyn’s lips and the way that her fingers scored across his flesh, as the fire within her turned from passion to resentment because her words weren’t his, and his weren’t hers; they were just running on stolen time. It saw the birth of his precious, sweet Joanna, with her wide, hazel eyes and her tumble of copper-crimson curls that sprung like candy floss around her little shoulders.

As much as it kept him, held him and harnessed him, tried its best to secure him in place where his roots were planted deep in the Georgia marsh mud, though, aviophobia found its match in a galaxy of blue with an ion storm for a heart.

_-_

_This wasn’t how life was supposed to work_.

-

There were rules about life, things that were constant within their existence.  The theory of gravity, proven on a cold February day in the 21st century. The understanding of day and night, the motions of the sun as the earth rotated slowly around it. The fact that the words etched into his skin at the birth of his soul mate would be the most memorable thing they said to him in their life. The way that his daughter was the light of his world.

These were the things Leonard knew, only a fraction of the facts and theorems and practicals that he had learned and experienced with his own mind and hands, but he would never trust words. Words were tricky, fickle things that worked around circumstances that they themselves chose to best fit. _I think I’m pregnant_ , words whispered in a startled hush from his supposedly infertile mother. _Doctor’s said its cancer, Elle_ slurred into callused workman’s palms by his terminally diagnosed father. _Let’s run away, right now, don’t look back_ pressed into Jocelyn’s soft abdomen in a handwriting that wasn’t his own; too clean and too thick. No rhyme, no reason, and the scientific community had run themselves ragged over the past century doing their best to try and understand.

And he knew the color of the inside of a shuttle’s bathroom, the splash of bile against the toilet. He knew the crisp, professional tones of flight attendants telling him to take a seat for his own safety, and his own rebuttal that he’d had one, a real nice one, in the bathroom with no windows to stare through or be sucked out of. And he knew the impossible, _galactic_ blue of James T. Kirk’s eyes, framed by dark golden lashes and accented by a blooming purple bruise and a crusted cut on his full lower lip. He knew the amused sound of the kid’s pandering, the prattle of his educated words, and the way that he filled a black leather jacket.

Len _knew_ Jim, from the ruffle of his sunlight hair in the morning to the way that the younger man took his coffee. He knew the sound of his roommate falling out of bed at odd hours of the night, and coming completely awake in a brightly lit, questionable diner at three in the morning, with Jim picking at a fruit bowl across from him. He knew the difference between mumbling nonsense in sleep and the nightmare induced gagging of a man who couldn’t breathe, and knew the ever growing list of Jim’s allergies and the fact that he kept his brother’s tattered, stuffed bear under his bed.

Leonard knew that Jim was his friend just as much as he knew that he loved him, and he found that love in the name _Bones_ , in the way that hypos slipped into the tender muscle between Jim’s neck and shoulder. It showed in the way that Len found himself following without question behind a man four years his junior and more than twice as haunted, and in how he found a home in wide blue eyes and a ravenous yearning to map that scarred, golden skin with his hands, his mouth.

_-_

_He should have known better_.

-

“Bones!”

His sickbay was a madhouse, filled with cryotubes that had recently been emptied from their torpedo shells and nurses who didn’t know where to stand. He didn’t have enough hands for this, nor did he have enough patience for this kind of incompetence at the end of the day. His already thin patience was wearing, and the strong urge for a strong drink had set in hours ago.

Jim though; Jim was wild and wide eyed, a welcome sight that he drank in with greedy eyes and a hungry heart. There were bruises on his beautiful, sun kissed skin, and those were splits on his full lips; signs of exhaustion on his shoulders. Space was harrowing and space was hard, dangerous and deadly, all wrapped up in one dark vacuum.  Hadn’t he said something like that once?

“Bones!”

Scotty looked just as harried as Jim, except that was _Scotty_ , on the ship when he hadn’t been previously, present despite his resignation and his temper tantrum. Between them, Carol sagged, heavy and bleeding sluggishly, with her weight centered on one leg and her breathing short. Nothing that his nurses couldn’t take, not when Jim needed him more, professionalism be damned.

“Nurse!”

Lilian slipped in then, familiar with her pressed blue dress uniform and her short bob of black hair. Dark eyes glanced off of him for a moment, only a moment, and then she caught Carol by the arm, Lilian tucking herself into her side to support the other woman. Nyota, God bless, caught the officer by her other side, and their fingers nearly laced behind her back as the two held her up, shuffling Carol to a bio bed.

He watched them go with eyes just as dark as Lilian’s had been, assessing Carol’s condition even as he ignored the woman. There was no displayed bone despite the obvious break, no obvious signs of detrimental head trauma from the way she had started to talk quietly to the girls. No internal bleeding, not a trace of a wheeze in her breathing even if there was a pale glaze to her skin and something thin-stretched in her eyes and Len turned, then, to find Jim.  Jim, who stood with his arms loose at his sides, as if he didn’t know how to hold himself.  Jim, whose fingers were half curled in the empty air, wide eyed and nearly lost looking, and Scotty behind him.

“Good to see you, Jim.”

There was a faint bite to his words, something dark and sarcastic on his tongue, and he saw the way that Jim flinched.  A minute thing, barely a twitch along the seam of his strong jaw, but it was visible enough, and Len wanted to reach out then; to trail his fingers through Jim’s hair, pull the shorter man into the carefully constructed cage of his arms until he was safe, bruises and starvation-scared skin and all.

No time, there was never any time, not when he’d never held Jim like that, never said the words that burned on his tongue before.  Everything burned in the end, boiled over at the end of the day to find itself a new home in the bottom of a bourbon-stained tumbler.  Later, Jim could know later, he would tell him later- but he said that every single fucking mission, didn’t he?

There wouldn’t be a _later_ , there had never been a later.

“You helped Spock detonate those torpedoes?”

There was a wounded quality to Jim’s voice, something hushed and horrified, and _oh_. It explained the austerity of his gaze, the echo of something small and sad within his tone. Jim was worried then, scared in a way that he would never admit to being, and that stung something awful.  Worse, he couldn’t tell where the worry lay; if Jim was concerned for himself or for Leonard, as if he was afraid that the doctor would fall apart.

“Damn right I did.”

His tone was as exhausted as it was sure, and he watched the way that it fell over Jim. Watched how his jaw fell open, full mouth gaping, just as he watched the way Scotty tried to make himself look busy with something in the background. Sickbay was too crowded for that already, and he couldn’t blame Jim for the haze the Captain was obviously experiencing. There was probably nothing quite like rocketing through an asteroid field in a space suit, even if the even the idea of it made him sick, and the smaller man couldn’t seem to find words for a moment then, tongue caught behind his teeth.

“Spock. He killed Khan’s crew.”

Crew was family in Jim’s eye, and he knew that, just like he knew the stress-rattling wheeze of Jim’s breath and the slide of his Adams Apple beneath his skin as he swallowed. And family- well, family was sparse out here in space; family was a frail concept that could fall apart just as easily as it held together. It was something that Jim had been starved for, had fought for, something that he didn’t think he deserved to have no matter how many times Len told him otherwise. There were some things he just wouldn’t believe, and speaking those words had set a startled glaze across Jim’s bright, breathtaking eyes.

“Spock’s cold, but he’s not that cold.”

He shook his head slowly, arms crossing over his chest to keep from reaching out for Jim. From somewhere behind him, he could hear Nyota scoff, and his eyes shut for a short moment to call on patience that he simply didn’t have. _Infants._   He worked with infants and toddlers; with toys that couldn’t be touched and snacks that couldn’t be shared.  “ _I’ve_ got Khan’s crew.  Seventy-two human popsicles, safe and sound in their cryo-tubes.”

Just like that, Jim’s strings were cut, and Len watched the way that his best friend sagged within himself. His hands found his sides then, and he watched as Jim’s fingers curled into his uniform shirt just above the crest of his hips. There was something reverent in the color of Jim’s eyes then, something wistful on his breath, and Leonard didn’t understand that quite like he wanted to, didn’t know what to do with that sort of look, the kind of desperate quiet that he’d only ever seen staring back at himself in the mirror.

When he spoke, Jim’s voice was a wrecked, gutted sound, and his words were pulled from the battered curve of his ribs.

“Son of a bitch.”

-

 _This was the end_.

-

There would be a later.

There would; he wouldn’t give himself an option this time. There would be a later, when Jim opened those beautiful eyes of his, when he started using that kissable mouth, moved those fingers once more.  Jim was motion and life, light and laughter all wrapped within his sunlight skin and his unearthly eyes, and to see him so still was wrong.

Jim was never still, not even in sleep, and to see him so unmoving – _there would be a later._ There had to be, Leonard wouldn’t take no for an answer. Not now, not since he had opened that bag and had seen the grey tinge to Jim’s skin, had felt the cold set of death in place of his usual warmth. There would be a next time if it was the last thing that he ever did.

Around them, Jim’s hospital room was quiet save for the soft pattering of rain against the windows. There would be thunder later, dark clouds having already filled the sky with their heavy presence, and the only light that filled the room was artificial. It had been harsh when he’d first entered an hour ago, as if someone didn’t understand how sensitive a patient’s eyes could be when they first woke from a coma, and he had scoffed at their lack of compassion before lowering the lights to ten percent.

Carefully, he lifted the leg closest to him first, from beneath the warm hospital blanket, sweeping the damp cloth across the sweat-tacky flesh.  Jim hated to be cold, even more than he hated the charged feeling of sonic showers, both psychological side effects from post-Tarsus rescue conditions upon the _Yorktown_. He remembered this from blanket mountains piled high on dorm beds, from swathed cocoons pressed tight into Jim’s corner of the room as the young man shook with chills and insomnia.

There was no use making him uncomfortable while he was asleep.

Shifting where he stood, white hospital coat pressed tight around his throat, the collar was constrictive. He could feel it when he swallowed, and he could feel it fighting with every breath that he took, and Leonard would have snarled any other time at the press of it. Now though, the confinement stood as a reminder, as if Jim lying motionless and breathing slowly once more in a hospital bed wasn’t reminder enough of what he had technically lost, of the oath he had broken.

Hundreds were dead from Khan’s rampage and misplaced revenge and grief; thousands more were injured, filling hospitals and clinics alike. Bodies were still being pulled from the wreckage, over a month later, and Jim had missed the memorial ceremony. Leonard didn’t know which would bother the man more, but he imagined that this coma was the most sleep Jim would get for a while, and the notion of it put a bitter taste in his mouth.  There would be self-incrimination where none was deserved; Jim would find a way to blame himself, would do his best to find a reason that he was at fault for the actions of one augment.

Shaking his head quietly, Len folded the blanket over, where it sat at Jim’s knee, and pulled it till it bared his thigh. The hospital gown had already been pushed aside, and while the catheter was a sterile, cold reminder of the situation they were in, it kept his mind as professional as he could manage at the moment. Even at his groin, Jim’s skin was damp with sweat, smelling of the musk that had gathered there overnight while Len slept, and he swept it away with gentle, effective hands before turning his attention to Jim’s thigh.

And his breath caught.

And his eyes watered.

And the world stopped.

There was a tremble to his sturdy, legendary surgeon’s hands then. Cloth forgotten in its shallow bowl on the night table, he hesitated for a scant moment before giving in, reaching out. The skin was slightly raised along the letters, thin and black and slanted, looping in a sloped cursive scrawl that was more absent minded than intentional. He knew that writing just like he knew those words, etched lovingly into the meat of Jim’s inner thigh, normally hidden from view and no doubt safe guarded.

_I’ve got Khan’s crew. Seventy-two human popsicles, safe and sound in their cryo-tubes._

A thin, high whine filled the air, and with mounting distress, he checked the monitors on the bio bed. The readouts were level though, for all intents and purposes, and oh-oh that sound came from him, those were his lips, his lungs, _and his_ body making that desperate, desolate, _wounded_ gut-punch of sound. Worse, now that he had identified it, he couldn’t seem to get it to stop, and Leonard felt as the shakes spread from his arms to everywhere else, pulling at his insides until he had to grip the bed for support.

“Oh darlin’, oh Jimmy, I- _fuck_! Fuck, fuck, n-no you can’t _do this_ to me, not now!”

Those words were _his_ words; things he had said with a slow kind of pride, at his own skill and his own smarts, as delighted with himself as he had been tired. And this feeling, this gutted, open-chested kind of burn that had started to spread all over, surely this must have been what Jim had felt, standing there in sickbay, with his beautiful eyes wild and his body battered like the world had both fallen out from under him and righted itself all at once. This pulling in his chest, this pain, this wasn’t what he wanted it to be, not when he knew those words and knew where they belonged, not when he wanted so fierce he felt he would be sick from it.

His breath was a sob, and Leonard clapped a hand over his mouth with sudden force, felt the way his mouth bruised in protest to the treatment. It didn’t matter though, not over the thundering of his heart in his chest or the pulling in his blood, and those were tears. Dripping down his face hot and free like they hadn’t since he’d opened that fucking body bag in his sickbay and witnessed that beautiful, impossible man lying there still and cold. Shuddering, inhales ragged, he couldn’t stop the heavy, wetness of his breathing even when he tried, and instead, his free hand smoothed Jim’s wheaten-gold hair from his forehead with a shivering, loving caress.

He dusted his mouth across Jim’s temple then, in a way he’d never allowed himself to before, and the breath that he had just barely managed to catch became a choke of sound all over again, lodged somewhere in his throat. Tight and hot, a pulsing ball of thick and hard, and every breath burned, and every single one was beautiful.

“I know you’re tired, but I need ya to wake up for me here real soon, darlin’.”

Words hushed against Jim’s skin, there was so little he could do, in place of how much he wanted, how hard he burned and how fiercely he ached. So he gave another kiss to Jim’s skin, then another, another, as soft as the first had been and just as trembling, a religious awakening in each pass of his mouth, and Leonard gave another quiet, distressed whimper.

“So I can love you good and proper, alright? I’m gonna be the kinda soulmate you deserve Jimmy, but you gada wake up first. Can’t show you I love you when you’re laid out like this darlin’, so please. _Please_.”


End file.
